ly resisted. But we have
hindered, perverted, temporarily checked that growth, age after age; and
again and again has a given nation, far advanced and promising, sunk to
ruin, and left another to take up its task of social evolution; repeat
its errors--and its failure.

One major cause of the decay of nations is "the social evil"--a thing
wholly due to the androcentric culture. Another steady endless check
is warfare--due to the same cause. Largest of all is poverty; that
spreading disease which grows with our social growth and shows most
horribly when and where we are most proud, keeping step, as it were,
with private wealth. This too, in large measure, is due to the false
ideas on industry and economics, based, like the others mentioned, on a
wholly masculine view of life.

By changing our underlying theory in this matter we change all the
resultant assumptions; and it is this alteration in our basic theory of
life which is being urged.

The scope and purpose of human life is entirely above and beyond the
field of sex relationship. Women are human beings, as much as men, by
nature; and as women, are even more sympathetic with human processes. To
develop human life in its true powers we need full equal citizenship for
women.

The great woman's movement and labor movement of to-day are parts of the
same pressure, the same world-progress. An economic democracy must
rest on a free womanhood; and a free womanhood inevitably leads to an
economic democracy.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Our Androcentric Culture, or The Man
Made World, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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